A month ago I began a new project that blends my love of landscape/rural photography with my love of literature; namely, Thomas Hardy.
I call this project ‘Wessex Postcards’, and I’ve decided to collate this work with its own instagram account.
Thomas Hardy set most of his work in the fictional county of ‘Wessex’, which is a stand-in for the real life counties of Dorset, Somerset, Hampshire and Wiltshire. Coincidentally, this is where I live and where I make much of my work. As Thomas Hardy is a writer I’ve long admired, I thought it would be interesting to photograph some of the places that either appear in his work or could have helped inspire it. When presenting these images, I wanted to juxtapose them with prose from his novels and poetry. Simple enough eh?
Dorset is probably my favourite place in the South, and undoubtedly where I’d like to live one day; therefore researching places to photograph and researching them is proving to be rather fun. This weekend in fact, I visited Cerne Abbas for the first time – and boy, what a stunning place! To get there I travelled via Milborn Port, and that too was a lovely little village. These are definitely the places I envisioned when coming up with this project; though I confess they’re actually a bit too pastoral/beautiful for the world of Thomas Hardy. His novels tended to be somewhat bleaker and explored the juxtaposition between civilisation and nature. In the winter, I’ll find some heathland to get lost on for that.
What appeals to me most about this project, I think, is the sense of continuity. These landscapes have been walked, written about, imagined and reimagined for generations, and yet they remain quietly unchanged in many ways. There’s something reassuring in that, and something creatively freeing too.
I’m not trying to document Wessex in any definitive sense. Instead, this is more of a personal response: a way of noticing, slowing down and pairing images with text in a way that hopefully invites a second look.
Some places will feel instantly recognisable; others less so. Some images may lean into beauty, others into something a little more austere — closer, perhaps, to the tone Hardy often struck.
Over time, I’d like to build a collection that reflects that range. Villages, coastlines, churchyards, fields, roads — all the small, often overlooked spaces that sit between the more obvious landmarks. And alongside them, fragments of Hardy’s writing that seem to echo what’s seen.
For now, this is just the beginning; there’s a long list of places still to visit in Dorset and beyond, and no doubt the direction of the project will shift as it grows. That feels like part of the point.
If you’d like to follow along, I’ll be sharing images and excerpts over on Instagram as the project develops:
www.instagram.com/@wessexpostcards
